Branches

Branches finds North Carolina fiddler and violinist Andrew Finn Magill confirming the promise of last year’s debut, Roots. The earlier focus on laying down foundations is replaced here by a pushing outwards towards other musical terrains. Squarely rooted in Irish traditional music, Magill’s self-penned instrumentals borrow familiar forms such as reels, polkas and strathspeys but are strikingly accented by other idioms. It’s an eclectic approach, but the playing – of noticeably greater confidence – by Magill makes it sound coherent and excitingly fresh and vital. After beginning in unadulterated fashion with a number of tightly executed numbers almost purely Irish in sound and sensibility, the album continues with a raft of hugely entertaining collisions. There’s a Stéphane Grappelli brio to the jazzy ‘Mary and Alice/Dream of a City’, laid-back sultriness in ‘Relapse’ and a joyfully relaxed funkiness to ‘December’. Elsewhere on the album there are liberal hints of Appalachian old-time, as well as the blues and bluegrass (especially in the virtuosic and frenetic track ‘Shooting Stars’).

Magill’s long-time collaborators – notable among them Lúnasa fiddler Colin Farrell, Rising Appalachia’s David Brown and Paul McKenna and Séan Gray from the Paul McKenna Band – add thrilling contributions of their own in a superbly recorded set. But Branches remains Magill’s album and, as such, it’s something of a triumph.